SINCLAIR, May.

£125 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. First American edition of one of the earliest English accounts of the First World War to be published by a woman. The author expanded Impressions from the journal that she kept during seventeen days spent volunteering in the Field Ambulance Corps in Belgium. She pays particular attention to the psychological effects of violent conflict. Typically publishing under the pseudonym May Sinclair, Mary Amelia St Clair (1863-194) was a well-regarded and at times experimental writer. She was also one of the 12 founder members of the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London and was one of the first authors to explore psychoanalytic concepts in fiction. Impressions focusses on the emotional consequences of war, especially the varying sympathy and alienation experienced between civilian victims, aid workers and combatants. Of a refugee camp, Sinclair writes， "On all these thousands of faces there is a mortal apathy. Their ruin is complete. They have been stripped bare of the means of life and of all likeness to living things. They do not speak. They do not think. They do not, for the moment, feel… You can't believe what you see; you are stunned, stunned, stupefied, as if you yourself had been crushed and numbed in the same catastrophe" (pp. 55-56).The book was first published in London by Hutchinson & Co. earlier that same year.Provenance: from the collection of the suffrage historian Elizabeth Crawford.

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